Is God Arrogant for "Wanting Glory"?

Maybe you've heard this one before:  God wanting honor and Glory makes him arrogant and I'd never worship a being that desired honor and glory for himself. 

What is the proper response to this?  This is a common objection and I think it’s built on the skeptic's inability to imagine a truly perfect being. The atheist builds this objection on a limited platform of what it means to be human – any person we know of, no matter how great, would be considered an egotistical megalomaniac if he demanded others to tell him how great he is. But God is not a human, not fallen, not in any way imperfect. God is the greatest conceivable Being. Therefore the atheist is here guilty of a failure of the imagination to consider the motivations and actions of a being of truly infinite power, wisdom and love.

So if we do start with such a Being, what should we make of a repeated desire that he be worshiped and that glory be ascribed to him? Well, if we reach in our minds for a PERFECT being, we reject out of hand a motivation as base as arrogance or insecurity. An all-sufficient being has no need to prop up a sagging ego. The atheist has in mind the flighty, petty deities that inhabited Mount Olympus when he sees the God of the Bible being worshiped. He thinks of a schoolyard bully who demands homage and we know why: he fears his own weakness.

But the God of the Bible never comes across like this. Instead, his glory (literally, his “weight”) is simply said to be a fact of his all loving, all holy, all powerful nature (Ex 24:16). His glory is not first a thing he seeks from us, it is first an unalterable fact of his very being. God IS glorious, whether you or I acknowledge it or not. So in that sense, his seeking to be worshiped by us, is not arrogance but a desire to teach a primary lesson in the nature of reality. If God is aback all things, this God is glorious, and when we align ourselves with this fact, we come into truth, and then it goes better for us. Far from being selfish then, God’s desire for glory is a gift to us.

Example: A person can live their life without ever knowing fully electricity really is. They see it, but maybe ascribe it to unknowable forces. But the more they find out what electricity is, the more they develop a healthy fear of its power, while at the same time developing more awe of the benefits of that power if channeled correctly. You can live OK without a really accurate view of electricity, but when you bring your life in line with reality, life takes off. If electricity had a “will” to bless us, it might instruct us to “glorify” the lightning bolt – for our own sake!

Just like that, it is God’s gift to us to show us (in Creation and Redemption) that behind the Universe is a First Cause, who necessarily must be all powerful, self-existent, eternal and spiritual. In a word, Glorious. When we get in line with this reality, we find the Source of our being, the Source of meaning, the Fountainhead from which we sprang, the Source of eternal comfort.

Moses, after being faced with the awesome power of God in the Egyptian plagues, had only one request, to see more of the glory of God (Ex 33). This request was not born out of a man being an obsequious runt, playing to Yahweh’s pathetic need to be feel “great”! Far from it.  Read the text, the OPPOSITE is true. His desire to see the glory of God was born out of God bringing him along in relationship and intimacy – in short, his desire to see more of God’s weighty splendor came as a result of God deciding to share that splendor with him.

How is this arrogant? This is the opposite of petty arrogance or insecurity. This is generosity! God wants to share who he is (his glory) with his creation. And only people who hunger for that glory, will get in on it – again a natural consequence of living in line with reality. Paul says that the people who will not so hunger (IE who did not glorify God) received in themselves all manner of troubles (Romans 1:21-25). Their chief error is that they believed a lie – and certainly if there is a God responsible for this grand universe, to ignore his existence and nature is a terrible oversight and will naturally lead to life not working right – and that's just how Paul's describes those who diminish or deny God’s “glory” (Romans 1:29-31).

As for people being somehow bullied by God into giving God this glory, two misunderstandings are probably happening.

Number one, the skeptic is probably incorrectly interpreting a specific Calvinistic branch of Christianity. They perhaps have a vague idea that Calvinists talk about God’s glory being the sole purpose of all his activity. And when one hears (as some Calvinists believe) that this God has pre-selected people for an eternity in hell, all for the “sake of his glory”, it’s not hard to imagine they have a problem with such a God. I won’t chime in here in on the debate within the church about predestination to hell, but suffice to say that most Calvinists struggle with “double predestination” (election to hell) and so the whole objection to God seeking Glory by sending people to hell, is probably a gross misunderstanding of A) how election works and B) God’s motives within election. We should rightly look at predestination as a separate problem to work out aside from the problem of God’s glory.

Number two, they probably are imagining this God saying time after time, “give me glory!” Perhaps some psalm or proverb in the Bible puts this sentiment in God’s mouth just like that… but I can’t think of even one time myself.  I’m ready to stand corrected on that point.  But the larger point is the repeated examples in Scripture of those human agents who have experienced the glory of God, who willingly and energetically “give God glory” and encourage others to do the same (Ps 29:1,2). Again, most of the time God’s glory is simply described as a simple fact of his perfect, splendorous and weighty nature – and how is that arrogant?

When the call is made to glorify the Lord, it’s usually not (if ever) God’s demand, but the fellow traveler’s plea to us: "I've seen the glory of the King, bring him worship, he’s worthy of it." This is therefore the furthest thing from an arbitrary, self centered demand from a petulant Deity. In Scripture we never find this formula from God’s mouth: “I'm great, say it, say it!"  Rather, the formula is something closer to, “I have greatness within my very Being, and if you will align with it, you will share in it.” (Romans 8:17)

So God's glory turns out to be awesome good news and speaks to God’s awesome liberality, not conceit.

Devastating Arguments Against Christianity (Courtesy of the Internet)

I'm re-posting an excellent blog I found HERE

I found it to be a concise response to 3 arguments against Christianity I keep running into on the Web.  The resident skeptic in your life may have throw these your way a time or two, so I thought perhaps it would be good to fact-check them all at once.

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Claim #1: “Religion has been the primary cause of war and oppression throughout the history of mankind.”

The Truth: In their comprehensive Encyclopedia of Wars, Phillips and Axelrod document the recorded history of warfare. Of the 1,763 wars presented, a mere 7% involved a religious cause. When Islam is subtracted from the equation, that number drops to 3.2%.

In terms of casualties, religious wars account for only 2% of all people killed by warfare. This pales in comparison to the number of people who have been killed by secular dictators in the 20th century alone.

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Claim #2: “The dark ages were a time of ignorance and superstition, thanks to religion’s negative influence on scientific progress.”

The Truth: Atheist writer Tim O’Neill responds to this claim eloquently in his excellent review of “God’s Philosophers”:  

“It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one - scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong.”

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Claim #3: “Jesus was a mythical figure. The New Testament stole most of its stories from other ancient sources.”

The Truth: These claims gained a lot of popularity thanks to the 2007 propaganda film “Zeitgeist” and its articulation of the Jesus myth hypothesis. It turns out that the “facts” presented in the image above are almost entirely fabricated. I was able to refute most of them in about thirty minutes of searching on academic websites:

Horus

• His mother (Isis) wasn't a virgin. Isis married her brother (Osiris) and conceived Horus with him.
• There’s no historical reference to a “star in the east,” or to Horus “walking on water.” Those are simply made up.
• Horus was never crucified or resurrected. Actually, he never even died! The story is that he “merged” with the sun god, Ra.

Mithra

• By most accounts, Mithra was born in either September or October.
• There’s no historical account of Mithra having twelve disciples. That part is also made up.
• Mithra wasn't said to have been born of a virgin, but rather out of solid rock.
• There’s no known record of a resurrection (or even of him having died).

Krishna

• Krishna was from the royal family Mathura, and was the 8th son of Devaki and her husband Vasudeva.
• There is no mention of a “star in the east” or a resurrection in the literature.
• There are some references to him performing miracles, but that’s about it…

Dionysus

• He wasn't born of a virgin. His mother was Semele (a mortal), and his father was Zeus.
• Dionysus died each winter and was resurrected in the spring. No mention of December 25.
• There are plenty of references to Dionysus turning water into wine…but he was, after all, the Greek god of wine.

The Web is a place for all kinds of "devastating" arguments like these, but often they're put forward with more zeal (or sarcasm) than knowledge.  So remember, "the first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him." Prov 18:17